It has been predicted that term limits in state legislatures--soon to be in effect in eighteen states--will first affect the composition of the legislatures, next the behavior of legislators, and finally legislatures as institutions. The studies in Term Limits in State Legislatures demonstrate that term limits have had considerably less effect on state legislatures than proponents predicted.
The term-limit movement--designed to limit the maximum time a legislator can serve in office--swept through the states like wildfire in the first half of the 1990s. By November 2000, state legislators will have been "term limited out" in eleven states.
This book is based on a survey of nearly 3,000 legislators from all fifty states along with intensive interviews with twenty-two legislative leaders in four term-limited states. The data were collected as term limits were just beginning to take effect in order to capture anticipatory effects of the reform, which set in as soon as term limit laws were passed. In order to understand the effects of term limits on the broader electoral arena, the authors also examine data on advancement of legislators between houses of state legislatures and from the state legislatures to Congress.
The results show that there are no systematic differences between term limit and non-term limit states in the composition of the legislature (e.g., professional backgrounds, demographics, ideology). Yet with respect to legislative behavior, term limits decrease the time legislators devote to securing pork and heighten the priority they place on the needs of the state and on the demands of conscience relative to district interests. At the same time, with respect to the legislature as an institution, term limits appear to be redistributing power away from majority party leaders and toward governors and possibly legislative staffers.
This book will be of interest both to political scientists, policymakers, and activists involved in state politics.
John M. Carey is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis. Richard G. Niemi is Professor of Political Science, University of Rochester. Lynda W. Powell is Professor of Political Science, University of Rochester.

In this innovative study of performance in international relations, James R. Ball III asks why states and their representatives come to the United Nations to perform for a global audience and how those audiences may intervene in the spectacle of global politics. Theater of State looks at key spaces in which global politics play out: in debating forums of the UN, at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and in peacekeeping operations in Africa and the Middle East, as well as in a variety of related media productions. Ball argues that culture and politics form a unified field organized by the theatricality of its actors and the engaged spectatorship of its audiences. He provides a theory of global political spectatorship: of how the world watches itself in institutions and beyond, and of what citizens and diplomats do by watching.
 
This study of the lived experience of spectacular politics on the world stage draws on theories of theater, performance, and politics to offer new ways of approaching issues of war, cosmopolitanism, international justice, governance, and activism. Situated at the nexus of two disciplines, performance studies and political science, this volume encourages conversations between the two so that each might offer lessons to the other.

 "Three Capitals is an in-depth study of Alabama's first three seats of government--St. Stephens, Huntsville, and Cahawba.... The University of Alabama Press has reprinted the book in a handsome new edition with a pertinent introduction by Malcolm C. McMillan. Brantley's study is a tribute to the accomplishments of an amateur historian and contains a wealth of useful information."

--Bulletin of the History of the Early American Republic

A challenge to the long-held view that the only important and influential politicians in post-Reconstruction Deep South states were Democrats.

In this insightful and exhaustively researched volume, Samuel L. Webb presents new evidence that, contrary to popular belief, voters in at least one Deep South state did not flee en masse from the Republican party after Reconstruction. As Webb demonstrates conclusively, the party gained strength among white voters in Upcountry areas of northern Alabama between 1896 and 1920. Not only did GOP presidential candidates win more than a dozen area counties but Republican congressional candidates made progress in Democratic strongholds, and local GOP officials gained control of several county courthouses.

Nor were these new Republicans simply the descendants of anti-Confederate families, as some historians have claimed. Rather, they were former independents, Greenbackers, and Populists, who, in keeping with the 1890s Populist movement, were reacting against what they perceived as the control of the Democratic party by "moneyed elites" and planter landlords. Webb also breaks with previous historical opinion by showing that ex-Populists in the Hill Country, who had been radical reformers during the 1890s, remained reform minded after 1900.

Webb's ground-breaking reassessment of Alabama state politics from Reconstruction to the 1920s describes a people whose political culture had strong roots in the democratic and egalitarian Jacksonian ideology that dominated north Alabama in the antebellum period. These people carried forward elements of Jacksonianism into the late 19th century, with its tenets continuing to influence them well into the early 20th century.